Velocity 2012 Speaker Slides & Video

Presentation slides will be made available after the session has concluded and the speaker has given us the files. Check back if you don't see the file you're looking for—it might be available later! (However, please note some speakers choose not to share their presentations.) Also, check out the presentation files from the 2011 edition of Velocity.

Topics

Web Performance

A wealth of performance and debugging data can be found in your web server logs. Graphs and trend lines are far better tools than a terminal and the find utility for analyzing what's happening in your logs. In this talk, we'll demonstrate some simple workflows for converting what's in your logs into graphs.

We (Cliff Crocker & Aaron Kulick) will take the audience through a working session that will leave them with a functional Web Performance Dashboard that they can customize to their individual needs. We will cover some of the available open source projects and tools as well as discuss the importance of synthetic vs real user monitoring (R.U.M.) and how they can be combined in a single pane.

Front-end engineers and product managers need to consider the impact of back-end service outages into their product design. We'll focus on design patterns and practices that will provide your site's users with a viable product, despite any back-end service degradations.

Do you have site visitors in different countries or continents? Then it's likely you use a CDN as the 'latency killer' that improves performance. But does it indeed make your site faster? Do you know how well your CDN is performing? In this session, you will learn about today's CDN performance variance and how to monitor, analyze and optimize CDN performance.

Why is this page rendering so slow? YSlow and other performance analysis tools give useful advices on improving the page load speed, how about after the page is loaded when users are actually interacting with it? The results of a data driven experiment with a handful of FE techniques in different browsers and devices will provide new YSlow ruleset of advices to boost rendering and user experience

Adding social widgets such as the Like button, Twitter or Google+ buttons helps drive traffic and engagement to your web site. But it does come at the price: more HTTP requests, more JavaScript to parse and execute. This session shows how you can minimize the cost of including 3rd party code to your pages.

In this talk we’ll start with a quick overview of SPDY and the mechanisms it employs to improve latency. We’ll then discuss the current options available for enabling SPDY on your own sites, and go over best practices and tools for optimizing your site for SPDY delivery, such as server push and TCP window size tuning. We’ll finish with a live demo, enabling and optimizing a site for SPDY.

Application failures follow patterns. That's a relief, because it means we can apply some common solutions. This talk discusses architecture and design patterns that will give your application robust uptime in the face of "interesting" and "exciting" events: partial failures, overloads, and slow responses.

Apple's iPhone SDK has been the largest disruption to software development since the Web, sparking the creation in a few short years of the largest medium for consumer engagement in the world, eclipsing the Web, movies, and even television.

Come learn about the factors that influence web performance metrics such as onload, time to first byte, and above the fold time, as well as which web performance best practices can be applied to optimize each metric. We'll spend time doing deep dive analyses of example web pages to see which factors influence these metrics as well as what can be done to speed them up.

Operations

The nature of abuse has changed drastically with the global adoption of the Internet. Platform tools and services developed years ago are no longer adequate. This talk describes changing characteristics of abuse, the evolution of our technical strategy to combat abuse, operational challenges and the development of a new framework to help combat abuse in the next decade.

If you've read "How to Lie with Statistics," are you immune to numerical tricks? Not a session for math geeks, this tutorial is instead about how to determine what matters and what doesn't, how to see what's missing as well as what you're shown, and how to turn numbers into knowledge

Facebook infrastructure head Jay Parikh shares key learnings from the company's work to build an infrastructure fast and reliable enough to keep more than 800 million users happy, but flexible enough to support rapid product iteration and major product evolutions like Timeline.

Data-centers DO fail, sometimes for the oddest of reasons. From frying squirrels to unspun gyros, the last decade has seen it all: hurricane and heat wave, fire and flood, even the threat of a nuclear meltdown. We'll chronicle the mundane to the insane, showing the reality of major data-center outages, interleaved with solutions and strategies for recovery.

I'll talk about how to make Chef a less intimidating learning experience for beginners and advanced users alike by getting under the hood, taking a critical approach and experimenting. I'll delve into the Chef source code with real world examples of writing Knife plugins. I'll show some best practices we adopt at Etsy and how we've made Chef an integral part of our Engineering team's workflow.

Your job – make sure your business’s website or ecommerce storefront is running fast and is always available to your customers. Why is this important? Research shows (and we are all aware) of how impatient people are when surfing the Web. Even a .5 millisecond slower response or load time, can mean the difference between a customer and a lost opportunity for conversion.

Jesse Robbins (Cofounder of Opscode) explains how to be a force for Awesome. He will explain how to evangelize & overcome cultural resistance to change (& share his own painfully funny lessons on how not to do it ;-). Jesse will teach you just enough Business Speak to be dangerous while you infect your organization with awesome, make your job better, and get more done.

How many people does it take to roll out and manage thousands of servers in a complex environment? With the right approach, a small team CAN effectively manage any size environment. This talk covers tips and techniques you can use right now to speed up and scale your system administration workflow.

This session provides an introduction to the open source host sFlow, approach to application monitoring. By using sFlow we can get near real-time metrics, with minimal overhead, not only on our networks, but also of our hosts and applications (e.g. Apache, Nginx, memcached, Java, Tomcat, and node.js). We can use that data to learn about the performance of our stack in a truly holistic way.

Mobile Performance

Measuring mobile website performance is often pretty hairy, involving a lot of mobile-specific knowledge. This tutorial aims to demystify the process by offering a deep dive into the many issues that impact mobile web performance, and cover some of the tools for measuring and tuning the performance of mobile sites.

Two years ago, Velocity attendees watched as an unsuspecting website was subjected to automated optimization before their eyes in the workshop "The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle", rated one of the top 10 sessions of Velocity 2010. This year, Hooman Beheshti is back - this time to demonstrate the impact of advanced _mobile_ optimization techniques on another unsuspecting website.

This talk highlights the basics of mobile browser interactions with the graphics processing unit (GPU). You will uncover how the layout engine leverages hardware acceleration, covering from acceleration of drawing primitives, the use of multithreaded tiled backing store, as well as advanced layer compositing.

Despite the explosive growth of smartphones and growing popularity of mobile web browsing, the energy consumed by a phone browser while surfing the web is poorly understood. In this talk, we present an infrastructure for measuring the precise energy used by a mobile browser to render web pages.

Sponsored

You may know Go Daddy for its Super Bowl commercials and controversies, but there's something much more serious going on at Go Daddy these days. CIO Auguste Goldman reveals how Go Daddy is evolving its approach with technology and transparency.

Understanding how users view and consume your site’s content is critical to optimizing the performance of your online business. By virtue of fulfilling nearly 2 trillion daily requests for content, Akamai is in a unique position to share ongoing analysis of Web traffic and user behavior.

Learn how you can use the open standard Web Timing API to frame your performance timings in the context of measuring the user experience. Reshape how Operations teams analyze and communicate the performance metrics of today’s web applications and sites, with a strong operational focus on performance timings, baselines, and actionable alerts.

Make your applications cloud ready while gaining application framework and architecture freedom of choice. Learn how VMware is simplifying, automating and standardizing the process of building, deploying and managing applications on hybrid cloud environments.

In 2008 MarketLive, a provider of eCommerce software, services and expertise designed specifically for mid to upper tier retailers, delivered average page performance of 8-9 sec. and avg. availability of 99.7%. Today they can offer 1-2 sec. load times and 99.95% availability. This is the story of that 4 year journey and the data-driven approach they used to get there.

Do you know the limits of your cloud application? Want to know what one million users look like? Mastering testing capacity for cloud and mobile applications can be challenging but it is critical to any successful application launch. Knowing how many users your application can handle is just one part of it. Understanding why and what to do about it is just as important.

Frank Ober, sr. performance architect at Intel, will ask the audience some though-provoking questions about their methods and tools for ensuring superior application performance. This will serve as a preview to Franks' session "Toward Agile APM: Application Performance Management at Intel" on Wednesday, June 27th
1:00-1:40pm, Ballroom E.

An increasing number of solutions for getting performance data directly in the browser are emerging. New W3C standards provide easy access to network related information. However, some of the really problems still persist.

Monitoring real world speed of a website or application is a difficult task. We'll look at Google Analytics' Web Timing API, providing fine grained real world speed data to its publishers.
Web developers typically must trade off maintainability and agility against latency. We'll analyze how mod_pagespeed accelerates web front-end performance, the transforms it makes, and their affect on speed.